The spotlight mechanism demonstrated here can be used to create a lightbox, highlight the areas of UI to draw user’s attention or similar purposes. So, the mechanism used in the demo has more uses than text shadowing. This is really cool. It is amazing what some people can do with simple things :-)

What would really be cool is if you had some causal text on a page and only when you mouse over it you can read private data. That way, if you are reading something confidential and someone comes around that wants to be nosy, you could just quickly move the mouse in a corner where nothing is actually revealed.

I think that all though this application is just “cute” and mostly not that useful in real life situations, I think there’s a general design pattern waiting underneath there which is to “don’t show what’s not needed” or at least “phase it down”. Kind of like what we’re doing with the BehaviorUnveiler at http://ra-ajax.org – (move your mouse over the thumbs to the left…)
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The same “philosophy” was being executed on when we created our SlidingMenu ( http://ra-ajax.org/Docs.aspx?class=Ra.Extensions.Widgets.SlidingMenu )

I can’t say I’m overly keen on all these “design” related CSS features – I can’t imagine how the bloaty sites like mySpace and Facebook are going to end up. As a purist I’d much rather see the web get leaner for performance over “cooler” for bloat…